THE CR.ITICS I . . . . . . . . . . ""1 BOOKS I HAVE TO ASK How Barbara Walters got where she is. BY NICHOLAS LEMANN B arack Obama walked onto the set of "The View" a few weeks ago and sat down. It took a moment for the fluttering to die down. When it did, Barbara Wal- ters turned to him and said, 'We were just saying before you came out-maybe we shouldn't say this, but we thought you were very sexy-looking." Walters then turned her gaze to the cheering audience, as Obama grinned and pre- tended to fan himself with his hands. There was more fluttering. Then Walters picked up a sheaf of notes on her lap and got down to busi- ness. "O.K., so here we go. . . . You've condemned the racist comments made by Reverend Wright, but you haven't disowned him. But when Don Imus made racist remarks about the Rutgers women's basketball team you said you thought he should lose his job. You said, and I'm quoting"-here she read from the notes-" 'There's nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about any- body of any ethnic group.' What's the difference?" Obama gave a careful and practiced answer. And now we were smack in the middle of a standard-issue news interview. Walters is, along with Mike Wallace, among the few remaining on-air televi- sion journalists whose careers encompass almost the entire history of television news. Before broadcast news emerged from the primordial ooze and separated itself from entertainment and commerce and opinion, just about everybody in front of the camera did a little of just about everything. Walters hawked Alpo on the air, assisted by live dogs. She got her big break, a full-time job on NBC's "T oday" show, in 1961, as a writer for a long-forgotten beauty named Anita Colby, who had a five-minute segment on the show that was sponsored by S & H Green Stamps and was devoted to fash- ion, makeup, and entertaining. Walters, whose first ambition was to be an actress and who had a couple of early jobs in public relations, became a journalist by accident, when NBC moved "Today" from the entertainment to the news di- vision and a sympathetic boss decreed that she could write for all segments of the show. Her transition to on-air per- sonality came by accident, too, when, after a few short, unplanned fill-ins, she got herself assigned to Paris to cover the fashion shows. It's that résumé which, in part, explains why Walters has never been hemmed in by the conventions of jour- nalistic conduct. Brian Williams doesn't have a way to coo at Obama and then segue into a slightly friendlier version of the usual reporter's tough question with- out stripping out his gearshift. In 1976, after a long career at "Today"-tech- nicallya news show, but with a high component of entertainment-Walters moved to ABC, where she signed on for a dual career, working partly for the news division and partly for the entertainment division. She is newsier than other enter- tainment reporters, and more showbiz than other news reporters. As she has gone from being well known to being famous and on to being an inescapable, if easily parodied, na- tional monument, Walters has taken the reporter-source relationship to a strange new place. While Oprah Win- frey, who declared as a contestant in a teen-age pageant that Walters was who she wanted to be like when she grew up, can no longer pull off the act of being in a position inferior to those she inter- views, Walters can, somehow. She also gets to offer her own opinions and feel- ings and to act as a combination oflov- ing but gimlet-eyed mom and one- woman embodiment of American public opinion. Her annual Oscar-season spe- cials-they and "The View" are the cash cows in the Walters empire-are as much about her gown, her choice of people to interview, and the judgments she pronounces on her subjects as they are about the stars themselves. She has interviewed every President since Nixon, and many of Americà s most notorious murderers. She is at once a bourgeois, an establishmentarian, and a Holly- wood queen transposed to Manhattan. She's what Marjorie Morningstar would have been like if she hadn't come to her senses and turned herself back into Marjorie Morgenstern. Of course, it took more than an unconventional journalistic résumé to become Barbara Walters. It also took a giant personality. Walters's new mem- oir, "Audition" (Knopf; $29.95), makes that plain and gives us a sense of "who she really is," if this concept can apply to someone whose adult life has been lived in front of a camera. "Audition" is, for its genre, an unusually ambitious and suc- cessful book. It's long and suffused with an emotional intensity-mainly about the 8 ups and downs of Walters's career-that a::: keeps it from being dull even as it covers a lot of ancient ground about network- news executives and the formerly fa- 2 mous. Walters knows how to put on a <?, show. Although nothing in "Audition"' comes as a shock-Walters doesn't turn ' a::: out to be a stamp collector, or to have learned Aramaic-it belongs to a part of American culture that Walters helped Walters, whose career spans nearly the entire history of television, is a master at alchemizing news into showbiz, and vice versa.